Yesterday I read the first 61 pages of Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon on a train full holiday travelers. I’ll review it soon and, until then, here are five things I learned about the novel from four chapters:

1. Helen Knightly, the narrator, kills her mother in the first chapter. After the murder, Helen reflects, “For some reason I felt disloyal to her.”

3. Helen also imagines herself as a bronze statue, Middle-Aged Woman Ripping Underpants Off Dead Mother: “One could commission it for a schoolyard …”

4. Helen shares a surname with the hero of Emma, Mr. Knightley (sometimes spelled “Knightly”). I have no idea why. You don’t really think of “Jane Austen” and “Super Giant Mother Burrito” in the same breath, do you?

5. Helen describes herself as 49 years old and in “midlife.” So before the possibility of a nasty death sentence arose, she was planning to live to be about 98.